Page 42 of Freedom
Hunter Harper grunted in response. “Go ahead and take a seat, boys. Eggs and bacon are almost done.”
Jake’s hand on Tobias’s shoulder guided him to the same chair he had had last night. Tobias sat obediently, willing his heart rate down.
“Need an extra hand with anything?” Jake asked.
“I’ve got it under control, but you can go ahead and pour the coffee.”
A minute later, Jake set a glass of milk and a small plate of eggs, bacon, and toast before Tobias, then sat down with another plate and mug of coffee. Tobias glanced up for some sort of affirmation that he should eat and saw Hunter Harper turn toward the table. Tobias hastily dropped his eyes to his plate, but it was hard to stare at the good, real food without feeling nauseated. He wasn’t in the same blind panic as the night before, and now that he consciously faced the idea of eating (taking food like he deserved it, like he had any right), he couldn’t go through with it. He knew intellectually that Jake had given him this food and therefore he was allowed to eat, but the thought of taking one more step outside his place (after wearing real clothes, sitting in a hunter’s chair at the same table as the hunter) knotted his stomach tighter and closed his throat. He couldn’t eat.
“Hey, Jake.” Hunter Harper’s voice was loud in the uneasy silence. Tobias almost dropped the butter knife he was using to divide his eggs into smaller and smaller pieces. “You remember that Buick I got last time you were here?”
Jake looked up, interested, a sliver of bacon swinging from his mouth. “The ’70 with the criminal rust job and the big-ass valves?”
“Yeah. I got a carburetor that fit her, but the damn thing’s still coughing like an eighty-year-old asthmatic smoker. Think you could take a look, figure out why it hates me?”
“Yeah, sure, though I doubt I can tell you anything you don’t already know. Didn’t you drive one of those? I mean, after you wore out that Model T.”
Hunter Harper feigned cuffing Jake on the back of the head. “Watch it, dumbass, I’m still young enough to beat the tar out of you.”
Tobias stiffened in his chair, his body a tense line against the old wood, his eyes snapping up to this sudden threat.No, you won’t. If Hunter Harper tried, Tobias would knock him to the floor. Tobias was a monster, and Hunter Harper could do anything he liked to him, but Tobias wouldn’t let him lay one finger on Jake.
With the adrenaline surging in his veins (ready to move and counter any threat, action, or attack, just like in camp when another monster had gotten too close), it took him a long second to realize the men had noticed his reaction.
Jake’s expression was somewhere between surprise, worry, and confusion, and his right hand moved closer toward Tobias across the table. Tobias reached back automatically, wanting that pressure, that reassurance, before he caught himself. Hunter Harper was watching too.
Hunter Harper eyed Tobias with the same mix of wariness and shrewd caution he had the first time Tobias walked into his house. Tobias could still remember the taste of the root beer on his tongue, knowing there was more in it than soda (maybe a drug to keep a freak down, maybe a test he would never pass) just by the way the hunter had watched him for the slightest hesitation.
Tobias ducked his head and tried to breathe. A new tension, almost danger, hung in the air, like the days the Director was displeased with personnel performance and the guards were looking to punish anyone who gave them an excuse.
The moment stretched (a chain from collar to interrogation room wall, holding him still, braced for the pain) until Hunter Harper cleared his throat and reached for his orange juice. Tobias cringed; Jake shook his head (to clear it, or with regret that he hadn’t chosen a better monster), and Tobias wished that he could be anywhere else.
“Roger...” Jake started, but Hunter Harper shook his head.
“It’s fine. Now, if you’re done eating the last of my bacon, you can get your sorry ass to work.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Jake rested his hand lightly on Tobias’s shoulder when he stood. Only then could Tobias snap to awareness—tranceseemed too deep,frozen terrortoo extreme to describe what he had been in—and start to clear the dishes. He hesitated before reaching for Hunter Harper’s plate, but the man got up without even glancing at him and headed for his study.
Somehow relieved, Tobias picked up the plate, still shaking from the adrenaline.
~*~
Roger tipped back inhis desk chair and closed his eyes, keeping his hand off the handle of his blade by force of will more than anything else. It was probably too early for a drink, dammit.
Sleep hadn’t come easily last night. He’d tossed and turned, his waking moments plagued equally by the thought that someone was sneaking up the stairs and the worry about how Jake and the kid seemed stitched together with hope and a prayer (except, you know, being a Hawthorne and a FREACS kid, probably not a prayer). His dreams weren’t any better, haunted by the memory of his last visit to Freak Camp, when he’d seen that kid’s face twisted by an emptiness that went infinitely past pain. He’d been up early, figuring it was better to get ahead on the salvage yard’s taxes than to fret about might-have-beens and half-formed fears.
When Jake and Tobias came down for breakfast, they looked about as shitty as he felt. Jake had smiled with dark circles around his eyes, and Tobias... well. Pale, silent, exhausted, the kid had barely eaten this morning. Jake hadn’t asked what he wanted, just gave him a few spoonfuls of scrambled eggs and a piece of toast.
The kid ate the toast slowly and did little more than push the eggs around on his plate. After half a dozen hours around the kid, Roger could almost think of him as a victim, a civilian, and focus on bantering with Jake, eating his breakfast, and enjoying the morning.
But when Tobias snapped to attention in the blink of an eye, hands fisted and eyes locked on Roger with the dark intensity of a vamp who’d already spotted the stake or a shifter he’d already nicked with silver, he got the distinct impression the kid wouldn’t hesitate to leap across the breakfast table to rip out his throat.
Reaching for his glass took steely nerves and a white-knuckled grip on his knife beneath the table. If the kid went for him or Jake, Roger wasn’t sure he could take him—it would all come down to what kind of freak the kid was, wouldn’t it?—but he’d be damned if he didn’t fight like hell in his own home.
But instead of going for him (would have been a perfect time while his arm was extended), the boy had flinched, and Jake had reached for him, and Roger had felt old, lost, and not sure he wasn’t messing these boys up even more than they already were.
It was reassuring, in some ways, to hear them working in the kitchen. Two sets of hands and voices meant that both those damaged boys were still alive and moving, holding it together, while he tried to figure out where he had gone wrong or right.
When Tobias had tensed up at the table, looked ready to go for Roger’s throat, for the first time Roger had seen the monster—dangerous, violent, unpredictable—he had hoped he wouldn’t find in the kid. Roger had never hesitated to put a monster down. But there was nothing about this situation that was so cut-and-dried. He had to tread as carefully as he would over a tomb of angry ghosts.
